Ferguson media get into the story

The line between news reporting and opinion is blurring in Ferguson, Missouri, as some national journalists inject their perspective and even themselves into the story.

The conduct of a few prominent members of the press on the ground at the site of the police shooting of Michael Brown has drawn the attention of media observers and prompted the wrath of conservatives who see an anti-law enforcement bias in the Fourth Estate.

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On Monday night, CNN’s Jake Tapper blasted the authorities’ heavy-handed response to the demonstrations, which he deemed nonsensical. Wesley Lowery, the Washington Post reporter who was arrested last week along with Ryan Reilly of the Huffington Post, has called police conduct “militarized” and “aggressive.” Don Lemon, on the air for CNN, even offered personal assistance to the parents of Brown. “If any of you ever need anything, you know how to get in touch with me personally,” he told them during an interview.

“To me that was a line that was very clearly crossed,” said Amy Simons, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. “He had gone from being an independent journalist to clearly advocating and making it known which side of this issues he’s on at the moment.”

Lemon and Tapper both declined to be interviewed, CNN said.

Lowery has given several media interviews since his arrest and engaged in public battles with his detractors, including MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who suggested that Lowery should have been more compliant with the demands of law enforcement.

“I would invite Joe Scarborough to come down to Ferguson and get out of 30 Rock where he’s sitting sipping his Starbucks smugly,” Lowery told CNN last week.

Lowery did not respond to a request for an interview, but he has made his feelings known on Twitter. On Tuesday, he tweeted, “No journalist … should be getting arrested for doing their jobs.” Asked by one user if there was “a danger of putting journalists capricious arrests above other capricious arrests [of protesters],” Lowery replied: “No.”

Even in the age of digital media, where Twitter has allowed for excessive commenting on every news development, the injection of media narratives into the Ferguson story — MSNBC’s Chris Hayes had rocks thrown at him by protesters, Lemon was pushed around by a police officer, etc. — has drawn notice and, in some cases, criticism.

The loudest condemnations from conservatives: In a post for Hot Air on Tuesday, Noah Rothman argued that “the press is no longer serving as objective chroniclers of the proceedings.”

“In many ways, the media appears to believe that it is an active participant in the events in Missouri. What’s more, the press appears to be relishing this role,” Rothman wrote.

“During the cable news networks’ live broadcast of events in Ferguson last night, in which reporters filled the hours with increasingly frenetic prognoses about the worsening situation in Ferguson, it was impossible for the media to not become part of — if not central to — the story in Missouri,” he continued.

Matt Lewis, a blogger at The Daily Caller, agreed with Rothman and also wondered about the careerist motivations that might drive some journalists’ coverage.

“[I]f you were an overly-ambitious, and perhaps quixotic, young reporter or blogger,” he wrote, “wouldn’t it make sense to intentionally become part of this sort of story — especially if you thought the risk-reward ratio was favorable.”

To be sure, there are cases in which it is all but impossible for a journalist to avoid becoming part of the story.

Ryan Devereaux, a reporter for The Intercept, is one of several journalists whose arrest has garnered national attention. But as the site’s editor John Cook explained, Devereaux “wasn’t inserting himself into anything, or drawing attention to himself or anything else at the moment he was arrested.”

“He was trying to get back to his rental car so he could go to his hotel after a long night of covering unambiguously newsworthy civil unrest when members of a St. Louis County Police Department tactical team shot him in the back with what he believes to be a rubber bullet, handcuffed him, arrested him, and detained him overnight in county jail,” Cook said in an interview. “Any suggestion that his conduct was inappropriate, that he was to blame for the law enforcement assault on him, or that his very presence on the streets of Ferguson was somehow navel-gazing or self-involved is preposterous and false.”

“When you are on the scene, sometimes it’s kind of hard not to become part of the story,” said Sandy Davidson, a professor of communications and media law at the University of Missouri.

“When you have a photographer who is overcome with tear gas and then, of course, you have other journalists from CNN, who are there to record it, journalists are getting swept up in it, and journalists are a part of the story, I do believe, in part because it’s a story of journalists feeling unduly restricted to report on a matter of very public interest,” she added. “I compare it to Gaza; it is like a war scene.”

Reilly, the Huffington Post reporter, also noted that the media have a tendency to “protect [their] own,” which can result in disproportional coverage of journalists. Media personalities are also better known than the average citizen, and readers have the expectation that they can be trusted, he said.

“I definitely didn’t come down here planning on becoming a part of this story — I would have been much happier staying out of it. But that wasn’t really a choice I had, because I was locked up,” said Reilly. “As a reporter, you’re in the midst of it, and your presence is obviously going to have an impact.”

He added, “It’s tough to imagine how much worse the treatment must be for those who aren’t in the media, who don’t have that platform that we in the media do. Obviously, our story doesn’t compare to what other people have gone through.”